


and the dust danced

by shakespearespaz



Category: Crimson Peak (2015)
Genre: Gen, Ghosts, Internal Monologue, Post-Canon, ish
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-06
Updated: 2015-11-06
Packaged: 2018-04-30 06:41:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 892
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5154017
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shakespearespaz/pseuds/shakespearespaz
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ghost Lucille haunts Crimson Peak. Non-linear and more simply character thoughts loosely assembled quasi-poetically.</p>
            </blockquote>





	and the dust danced

No words could capture the singular sensation of being a ghost.

Even if every terrible, nauseating detail was explained, the experience was one that transcended logic and sanity. It was, as by design, agony, there was no doubt. But it was also peculiar in the lack of uniformity, in the way time, emotion and action spiraled together, tangled and unable to right themselves.

She was not alone in the house, although all flesh and blood had left it long ago. Enola, her mother, the others, they would catch sight of each other, or not so much sight as presence. They could catch each other’s presence. The piano would play (she would play, she thought it was her playing but could never be sure), and distant voices might sing or scream, and suddenly they were in that moment together, on the same plane.

Then the wind would wail, and the thread snapped, and she was alone, as always.

Lucille didn’t always see the house as it was. How she remembered the house was her most common environment, as if her consciousness, unable to escape its own perspective, bent time towards her. Sometimes, the anxiety and hatred that pulled taut in her stomach and kept her bony self from dissipating would loosen, and she floated away from her reality. Once it was a ball long before her time, warm and rustling and swirling, swirling, swirling until a woman with white hair screamed, and the plated furnishings rotted to dust, and the dust danced into the snow, until sinking wood was swallowed by crimson, before she was returned to the mere cusp of total decay that she recalled.

She was still tethered by it all to her place.

Her place as a sister mother mistress _monster._ The word ran through what was left of her head often. She could drown it in slow, melancholic practice, each note echoing through the empty corridors and grasping for happier memories. There were none to be found. Other times there was nothing left to do but cry, ferocious and unapologetic, into the night. It was the sound of deafening, other-worldly agony of the soul, of a life bloody and bruised and left with nothing to hold it together but fear and control. It was those nights that she could feel the burn and ache of earthly abuse past and present ethereal rot. And she longed for someone to hold her empty shell, and her longing made the air tingle with sweat and desire lost.

She laughed. She had laughed. Monsters. There was nothing in the world that wasn’t monstrous underneath the façade. Everything lusted and everything died.

Except her.

Lucille watched the house disappear around her. Passage of anything was hard to gauge, but more often the snow drifted in and melted out, again and again and again, until the roof finally caved. Thomas’ inventions landed on top of, in her mother’s piano and everything came full circle except for her. Boys with impossibly young faces played and hooted and were scared away until a bottle of alcohol with a flaming rag in it set scarlet flames to task eating the mansion from the inside, gutting the history and ache from the inside, but not the spirits, never the spirits. Mother’s face melted into nothing in the heat.

Lucille thought it a vast improvement.

The funny thing about limbo was that in limbo the end was unknowable, but Lucille had to believe the end was somewhere. She fantasized about Thomas coming back to her, coming back from where ever he had gone, back to this wretched spot of land that was rapidly becoming little more than that. Most of the house had gone, but she could still see it, little lines of dew or glue that stretched across the vast emptiness if the light fell upon it right. The hall was still there. It was still there because she was.

Winter came early. Red leeched through the fallen leaves that stubbornly remained, before drenching the fresh, thick layer of pristine snow. With little else she became fixated, sitting around the growing stain like a mother around a hearth. It seeped slowly, painted leaves poking through the white mush. Day after day after day, sometimes yesterday, sometimes forever in the future, she sat, splayed across the ground, herself a different type of stain.

The cold she could feel, she realized. The damp felt like a balm against her decaying body.

_Crunch._

Something moved across the snow towards her.

_Crunch._

Mother, possibly, for she was the only other one left.

_Crunch._

She and mother never managed to exist for more than a few moments together. Nothing there was forgivable.

Who then—

_Crunch._

She pried her eyes from the wound in the earth, raising her head to the gentle but steely eyes, grey hair flowing freely, too freely, as a bony hand offered itself to the shadow of life crouched below. The face was familiar but wrinkled, the expression unfamiliar but understood. Lucille heard her voice, although her mouth did not move.

_It’s time to go._

A wintry breeze picked up, and without the groaning of the house, Lucille could finally feel the sting against her tattered cheek. She accepted Edith’s hand, sorrows past soaking into drenched leaves and rotted wood.

For the first time, Lucille left Crimson Peak without looking back.


End file.
